It was my eleventh trip over the last 25 years on which I indulged in the luxury of letting llamas carry virtually all my gear. On trips lasting from five to ten days, with those stoic Peruvian camelids packing everything from bottles of wine to folding camp chairs, I’d explored the Wind Rivers in Wyoming and the backcountry of Utah and Arizona. But at the end of last April, as I headed with five companions into a long, sinuous canyon on Cedar Mesa in southeast Utah, it was the first time I’d ever worn a llama.

Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Stan Ebel, the founder and owner of Buckhorn Llama Company, an outfit based in the tiny burg of Masonville, Colorado, had launched a spinoff firm called Altiplano, specializing in garments made of llama wool. Ebel convinced me that the stuff might be the snazziest new concept in outdoor fashion.

Llama wool? I knew that alpaca wool, with its cashmere-soft weave, had been transformed into cuddly knick-knacks ranging from pillows to teddy bears. But through selective breeding over the past 6,000 years, alpacas have so diverged from their llama cousins as to become quite different animals. If I’d ever splurged on a pricey alpaca sweater, I might have worn it to an art gallery opening—not around the campfire. Meanwhile, I’d counted on synthetic fleece and fiberfill and down jackets to ward off the wilderness chill.

The imperturbable Bruce and Tres, laden with our gear and food, scramble out of an arroyo on Cedar Mesa; Photograph by Matt Hale

When you sling a saddle atop a llama’s back, just after he’s rolled in the dirt to scratch the unscratchable tickle of having lugged an ungrateful hiker’s 90 pounds of impedimenta another eight miles along the trail, you’re struck by how matted, coarse, and snarly the wool seems. But that’s why it makes for versatile outdoor wear. As scientific research demonstrates, llama wool’s very coarseness and its range of fibers from fine to thick mean that it can be woven into clothing that’s superior to down, fleece, sheep wool, and alpaca wool in criteria ranging from warmth to water resistance to usable life.

I might have guessed as much during my very first llama trip with Jon Krakauer into Stough Creek Basin in the Winds in the early 1990s. One afternoon, we cowered in our tent at timberline as golf-ball hail pummeled our camp. Worried that the deluge had bruised and battered our beasts of burden, I emerged during a lull to check out Cope Red and Hot Shot. I found them munching contentedly on the alpine grass, each wearing a thick coating of congealed hailstones on his back. The wool so insulated their bodies that the hail took hours to melt.

Still, when I received a sleek black Altiplano pullover in the mail, it seemed too nice a sweater to take on a pack trip. I wore it to parties and invited friends to stroke the fibers. But over the phone, Ebel reassured me, “Don’t worry, David, just beat the crap out of it as you would any other kind of jacket. It’ll get dirty, but when you get home, wash it in cold water and lay it out flat to dry. It’ll be as good as new, and it’ll last for years.”

* * *

Training a llama for packing is an esoteric art, and no company does it better than Buckhorn. I first fully appreciated this fact on the one trip among those eleven when I hired a different company. Blue Moon, as ill-trained as a colicky brat, managed during our trip to buck and rear when we tried to saddle him, to balk at stream crossings and narrow canyon passages, and once to spit in the face of my wife, Sharon. (As comely and aloof as llamas appear, their spit is one of the foulest excrescences known to nature.) It took forebearance and infinite patience to get Blue Moon back to the trailhead without killing him.

Last spring, in contrast, our four llamas behaved so impeccably that we wished we could tip them with something more generous than handfuls of their corn-alfalfa feed. Gus, brown all over, was the steam locomotive, plowing ahead on the steepest grades. It was clear that he needed to be in the lead. All-white Dwight was the most easy-going of the llamas, with the laid-back disposition of a Buddhist monk. Three-year-old Tres, with an oddly split ear and mascara-darkened eyes, seemed to prefer third place in line. Bruce, with a black patch on his tail, was our hummer, querulously cross-examining our every decision even as he unfailingly responded to each tug on his lead. At night we staked out the llamas apart, for forage, but so that each could see one of his companions. Even when they got tangled in the shrubbery, all four waited patiently for hours until we could liberate them.

It was something like my 65th trip to Cedar Mesa, which I’ve decided is my favorite place on earth. And yet I saw ruins and rock art—left behind by Ancestral Puebloans more than 700 years ago—that I’d never found before. Early on the first day, we passed a lordly site with the finest negative handprints I’ve ever seen. (The Old Ones masticated a clay called kaolin, held their hands flat against the sandstone wall, then splattered the backs of them with bright white expectorate.) Farther up the canyon, the ruins became wildly defensive. As we now know, in the hard times of the 13th century AD, the Ancestral Puebloans had to hide their corn, beans, and squash in granaries so remote and vertiginous that the bad guys from the next valley over couldn’t raid them.

During our five days, we saw some twenty ruins, visiting only five or six. A few others would have required death-defying climbs to reach. One, a three-story ruin improbably built in an oval alcove sixty feet off the deck, would have taken a devious and dangerous rappel to enter—but ropes are outlawed for reaching ruins on Cedar Mesa. Yet other granaries, on skinny ledges 500 feet up, looked all but impossible to visit. (I doubt that Anglos have ever entered them.)

We found pottery and chert flakes. Charley stumbled across the first arrowhead he’d ever found. Hunt, on his first trip in the canyon country, was stupefied daily. Greg, Matt, and I promised each other further excursions into the wildest crannies we beheld. And Sharon and Karen simply drank in the beauty of the scenery, as the full moon wheeled toward gibbous. After the first two hours on the first day, we ran into no other hikers throughout our sojourn.

And at night, we wore our Altiplano pullovers. Like ropes, campfires are not permitted in the Cedar Mesa canyons, and the temps got down to the low 40s. Still, so warm was my pullover that I never donned the North Face jacket that I habitually wore each evening on my Cedar Mesa jaunts.

Said Karen about the llama fleece, “It’s surprising. It’s warm but not scratchy. And it doesn’t pill or snag.”

I was mortified, however, on the second night when I spilled a drop of Cholula sauce on my pullover. I couldn’t rub it out, and it sat there on my chest, an orange blob accusing me of eating like a slob. But when I got home, I washed it out—along with other stains I’d hardly noticed. The still sleek sweater hangs today in my closet, awaiting my next venture into the paradise of the Southwest.

* * *

Besides pullover sweaters, Altiplano manufactures vests and hooded jackets in a range of sizes for both men and women. For further information or catalogues, contact Altiplano Insulation, Inc., P. O. Box 275, Masonville, CO. Phone: 800-318-9454 or 970-667-7411. Website: http://www.altiplanoinsulation.com/

]]>http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/08/wear-your-llama-out/feed/0Experts Weigh In: “Everest is Completely Out of Control”http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/09/experts-weigh-in-at-mountainfilm-everest-is-completely-out-of-control/
http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/09/experts-weigh-in-at-mountainfilm-everest-is-completely-out-of-control/#commentsMon, 09 Jun 2014 22:00:44 +0000http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/?p=15527An expedition member steps across a bridge of aluminum ladders lashed together above a crevasse in the Khumbu Icefall; Photograph by Andy Barton, National Geographic

“Everest is a shit show,” said Aaron Huey, a National Geographic photographer who is currently documenting the culture of Sherpa guides. Ten years or more ago, I mused, that pronouncement would have stirred up protestations, or at least murmurs. But this May, the Friday morning crowd, coffee mugs in hand, spilling well out the doorway of the Ah Haa School for the Arts at the Mountainfilm festival in Telluride, simply nodded in rueful agreement.

The last three spring seasons on Everest have seen controversies spiral into disasters. In 2012, Russell Brice, the most experienced leader of guided expeditions on the mountain, sent his whole team home early (no matter how much money the clients had paid for their junket) because he deemed the Khumbu Icefall unjustifably dangerous. When some 500 climbers later reached the summit, second-guessers accused Brice of chickening out.

In 2013, ace mountaineers Simone Moro and Ueli Steck provoked an unprecedented riot by ignoring the agreement to let the Sherpas put in the fixed ropes on the Lhotse Face without interference by Western climbers. It didn’t help that Moro, alarmed by an apparent fracas between a Sherpa and his partner, yelled (in Nepali), “Motherfuckers, what are you doing?” At Mountainfilm this year, Sender Films’ High Tension, documenting the chaos, which culminated in a mob of angry Sherpas confronting the superstars and throwing rocks at their tent, packed the Conference Center and led to another heated panel discussion.

This spring, of course, Russell Brice’s gloomy prognostication came true with a vengeance, as an avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall killed 16 Sherpas fixing ropes and carrying loads on that treacherous passage. The tragedy shut down the season on the south side of Everest, and at Mountainfilm the repercussions bounced off the walls of several auditoriums.

At the Friday morning session, titled “Nepal and the Money Train,” Conrad Anker, who found George Mallory’s body on the other side of the mountain in 1999, argued that commercial guiding on the South Col route no longer amounted to real climbing. “It’s become a high-altitude luxury camping trip,” he offered. “Camp chairs, DVD players, a big-screen TV at base camp . . . . If you need nine oxygen cylinders on summit day, you shouldn’t be there.” Wade Davis, author of the prize-winning chronicle Into the Silence, about the three British Everest expeditions in the 1920s, pointed out that the paltry 13 pounds that General Charles Granville Bruce offered the families of the seven Sherpas killed on the 1922 expedition actually amounted to more money than the $400 the Nepalese government promised to pay each of the families of the Sherpas killed in the icefall this spring.

An air of cynical distrust vis à vis the Nepalese government and the Nepal Mountaineering Association wafted through the panel. Ben Ayers, Nepal country director for the dZi Foundation, devoted to improving Sherpa village life, recounted an exchange with a government official who had come up with a solution to the “conga line” of hundreds of nose-to-ass climbers jumaring up the fixed rope on the Lhotse Face each spring. “We’ll just fix another line on the face,” said the functionary. “We?” queried Ayers. “The Sherpas,” emended the official.

Suddenly a young woman in the audience demanded the microphone. She had just returned from Everest, and she was pissed. “The reason I’m here is not the accident,” she declared. “The Sherpas leveraged the accident to make political demands on the government.” Evidently little fazed by the deaths of the 16 in the Khumbu Icefall, she was bent on trudging on up the mountain. But “an agitator threatened to burn down our Sherpa’s home if he continued on Everest.” Our Sherpa? I asked myself.

Norbu Tenzing, the son of Tenzing Norgay, gently summed up the modern corruption of the traditional way of climbing Everest that had made his father a hero. “Somehow the spirit is lost,” said Norbu.

The filmmakers of High Tension, who had set out to document Ueli Steck’s attempt to climb the West Ridge alpine-style and without bottled oxygen in 2013, had pulled a rabbit out the hat by capturing the violent confrontation between Steck and Moro and the Sherpas enraged at being called “motherfuckers.” “The story completely changed on us,” reported director Nick Rosen, in the panel discussion following the screening. On film, Moro tries to apologize for flinging an epithet in Nepali that reached the absolute nadir of insult (“This is a very, very bad word,” one Sherpa said). But in the next breath, Moro dismisses the rock throwers as “a few bad apples.”

To my mind, the sagest moment in the whole film came from the mouth of Tashi Sherpa, as he gazed back over more than 80 years of Sherpa service to Everest climbers. “The resentment was always there,” said Tashi. “This incident was waiting to happen, and it will repeat, as long as the Sherpas are humiliated.”

On Sunday, Wade Davis and Conrad Anker shared the lectern to talk about Mallory. Though both men are experts on the British expeditions of the 1920s, they had never appeared together on stage. It made for a curious back-and-forth. Having discovered Mallory’s body by deliberately poking outside the 1999 expedition’s designated “search zone,” Anker had deeply admired the Everest pioneer both before and after that fateful moment. “We all looked upon his mummified body with the greatest respect,” he said, “and with deep humility.” (Full disclosure: Anker and I co-wrote The Lost Explorer about the discovery.)

But Davis was having none of it. “The reason,” he pronounced, “that the deaths of the seven Sherpas in 1922 happened was the vanity of George Mallory.” And of all the members of the three expeditions, he added, “Almost every one of the 26 men was more likeable and more interesting than Mallory.”

Everest won’t go away, and the suggestions for ameliorating the mess it has become sounded to me like wishful thinking, if not pie-in-the-sky. It bothered me that only a few of the speakers on the three Telluride panels seemed truly devastated by the tragedy this spring. Sixteen deaths in a single avalanche matches the worst disaster in Himalayan history, equaled only by another avalanche catastrophe on the German expedition to Nanga Parbat in 1937.

The exception was Aaron Huey, who, though not a mountaineer himself, reacted strongly to the screening of High Tension. The end of the film dwells on the tragedy, “and yet,” said Huey, on the verge of tears, “it’s overlaid by happy music. There’s no happy ending to this story.

“Everest is completely out of control. It’s like crack.”

Meanwhile, on May 23—the same day as the first of the Telluride Everest panels convened—the Chinese woman Wang Jing reached the summit via the South Col. Originally a member of Brice’s team, she ignored the leader’s suggestion that she switch to the north side, hiring a “phantom operator” instead. (This sleight-of-hand could have caused Brice to be banned from Nepal for five years.)

With apparently limitless funds at her disposal, Wang convinced five Sherpas to guide her to the top. Those six were the only climbers to get up Everest on the south side this spring season. To avoid the unpleasantness of the Khumbu Icefall, Wang arranged to transport her teammates, herself, and all their gear and food directly to Camp 2 by helicopter.

Wang confessed that the deaths of the 16 in the icefall the previous month had made her “very sad.” But she had an agenda she couldn’t ignore—to complete the so-called “Explorer’s Grand Slam”—reaching the top of the Seven Summits and the North and South Poles—in record time. Missing out on Everest would have put the kibosh on her whole campaign.

“Climbing is about having fun,” says Shane Messer. “That’s what it’s all about. But we’re here tonight to train.”

He might have added, To train for the Nationals, but his listeners don’t need to be reminded.

What a scene. Around Messer stand some 35 boys and girls, ranging in age from nine to eighteen. From their squirmy energy, their manic chatter, you might think they were kids on the first day of summer camp. Instead, a gaggle of some of the best teenage and pre-teen climbers in New England, as well as recruits from other parts of the country, has assembled to hone their skills under the tutelage of one of the finest climbing coaches in the United States.

“Okay,” announces Messer, “Male ‘A’s go around the corner by the purple climb. Backs to the wall! You get four minutes on, four minutes off!”

Shane Messer, in the green jacket, talks to his students; Photograph by Garrick Kwan

We’re standing in the Central Rock Gym in Watertown, Massachusetts, an indoor climbing facility that opened last May. It’s the biggest climbing gym in the Northeast, and the best one I’ve ever cavorted in. Ambivalent for decades about gym climbing, I’d joined CRG after my first day there, and ever since, I head over to the place at least twice a week when I’m home.

In the corner by the “purple climb,” the first contingent of boys sits with their backs to the wall, so that they can’t get even a visual head-start on the five boulder problems Messer and his colleagues “set” the day before. Messer is CRG’s official Director of Route Setting, the honcho in charge of bolting polyurethane holds to the wall at just the right angles and in the right permutations to craft twelve-foot-tall routes that balance, in his words, “risky moves, tricky moves, and really challenging moves.”

“Okay,” Messer asks, “Who’s first?”

A ten-year-old boy shouts, “Me!,” waving his hand like the kid in class who knows he has the right answer to the teacher’s question.

During the next hour, I watch these young prodigies take turns staring at the problems, waving their hands in the air as they mentally rehearse the moves they’re about to make, then swarm from hold to hold. They can fall off as often as they want, but success is bounded by the clock. “Forty seconds!” Messer calls out. Then, “Time! Next climbers!” But in between, “C’mon, Sam! C’mon, dude!” And even as he’s watching the time clock, Messer pulls the landing mats into the right places to cushion the kids’ falls.

I ask Daniel Berman, a seventeen-year-old who’s one of the best climbers in the group, about Messer. “Shane’s really structured,” he says. “He has a game plan for each practice, and they’re as varied as can be. I really like having someone tell me what to do.”

Katie Lamb, a sixteen-year-old who’s already won in her age group at previous Nationals, tells me, “Shane’s a really great coach. But he’s not a scary person.”

* * *

Climbing coach—the very concept was unimaginable to my generation. Back in the 1960s and ‘70s, you taught your buddies how to climb, but you couldn’t call that coaching. Back then, of course, there were no indoor gyms and no national competitions.

Nor were there fourteen-year-olds who could climb V8, the level of difficulty (on a scale from V0 to V16) of some of the routes Messer had set for his Friday night camp. For that matter, we would have shuddered to see a fourteen-year-old on the rocks—for Christ’s sake, the sport was dangerous! But gym climbing has created an almost totally safe version of our pastime, and so it’s spawned the kind of teenage virtuosity previously reserved for gymnasts and ice skaters.

No genre of climbing has exploded in recent years like indoor gyms and the competitions they produce. According to Climbing Business Journal, there are now some 600 gyms in the United States, with new ones opening every month.

A couple of days after the soirée at CRG Wartertown, I showed two friends the boulder problems the kids had been solving. Both 24 years old, and climbing very well on longer routes, they couldn’t get off the ground on the “purple climb.”

During their four-minute waits between attacks on the boulder problems, I asked some of the kids how they’d gotten involved in this business. Nine-year-old Max said, “I came into the gym with my dad. We were looking for something to do. When I got old enough, I started to train more and more.” Old enough? You can train at nine, but not at seven?

“Is climbing the most important thing in your life, Max?”

“Umm . . . yes!”

Sixteen-year-old Solomon, from Philadelphia, looked back on his long trajectory in the sport. “I’ve been climbing since I was five,” he said. “But I really started when I was seven or eight.”

“What brings you here tonight?”

Duh. “I’m training for the Nationals.”

I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that youngsters could be so passionate about climbing. Each of them here in the gym—or rather their parents—had forked over $550 for a three-day sleepover camp commuting between Watertown and CRG’s sister gyms in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Glastonbury, Connecticut. This evening, after climbing themselves ragged, the 35 athletes would dine on lasagna, salad, and bread served in the yoga room, play a wind-down game of dodge ball, then crash in their sleeping bags on the gym floor. Boys downstairs, girls upstairs.

If any of the kids scored high enough in the next week’s Nationals (and Messer was sure some would), then they’d get to compete in the World Championships, to be held this August in, of all places, New Caledonia, the island archipelago 750 miles east of Australia.

The catalyst for all this Friday-night frenzy was Messer, whom I’d gotten to know during my frequent trips to the gym. And as I’d learned, the 28-year-old climber, route setter, and coach is a remarkable fellow.

* * *

Messer grew up a military brat in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He’d always been a good athlete, competing in track, cross-country, and wrestling. At the age of eighteen, he was eking out a very marginal living as a semi-pro volleyball player, despite the fact that he’s only five foot eight. “I was fast,” he explained, “and I could jump.”

Not until he was about to turn nineteen, however, did Messer try climbing. And it took a life-threatening crisis to push him there.

He’d always been a clean-living kid. To this day, he’s never drunk alcohol or coffee and never touched drugs. In high school, he hung out with the hard partiers, the drinkers and the pot smokers, just because, he says, “I became the designated driver. I got to drive all the other guys’ cool cars.”

Out of the blue, at 18, one day he found it impossible to urinate—except in his sleep, when he’d wet the bed. “It was scary and humiliating,” he recalls. It turns out that Messer was suffering from a rare condition that caused the sphincter at the base of his urethra to clamp shut. (Only in unconscious sleep would it relax.) His father took Shane to the Fort Bragg emergency room. There followed a prolonged trial by antibiotics (“I got every one of the side effects”), catheter, and hospital stay. The trapped urine was overrunning and poisoning his kidneys. Untreated, he would have died a painful death.

The three-month ordeal caused him to lose 30 pounds. Finally declared healthy, though weak and emaciated, he was determined to get back into shape. “That’s when I realized I actually hated running,” he told me. “It’s so repetitive. I tried weightlifting. Repetitive. So I took up climbing, at a gym in Fayetteville. It was the first sport I wasn’t good at. I climbed every day for six months, but it took me a week to get up my first V0.”

By now, in 2014, Messer is a nationally ranked climber. He recently succeeded on his first V13 (outdoors), putting him in rarefied company. But by his own admission, Messer calls himself “second-string, maybe third-string. I’ll never travel around the world as a sponsored climber, like Daniel Woods or Jimmy Webb.” Instead, Messer has become a master route setter—a far more complex business than it seems at first. And even more significantly, a master coach, one of two or three charged with grooming the national team. He says, in fact, “I love coaching. I’d be happy to make a career out of it.”

It quickly became clear to me why coaching and elite climbing, far from reinforcing each other, are incompatible. Shane Messer’s cardinal virtue is empathy. He really cares about his students. He wants them to succeed as badly as they themselves do. Empathy isn’t of much use for the top echelon of climbers—in fact it may get in the way. It’s not that guys like Adam Ondra and Chris Sharma are egomaniacs—it’s that they have a single-minded drive to excel. And that means climbing harder routes than anyone else. Bobby Fischer, the chess genius who loved to “crush my opponents,” would have made an elite climber, but he would have been a terrible coach.

* * *

At CRG Watertown that Friday evening, I watch Messer run the show. He doesn’t look like a climber, unless you notice the rippling muscles that most of the time he hides beneath a green down jacket. His face is vividly expressive. Short, spiky brown hair, clean-shaven cheeks and chin, blue-green eyes that light up as he teaches. At moments of particular enthusiasm, the right half of his upper lip curls upward. It would look like a sneer, except that the message he’s broadcasting is pure encouragement.

That evening Melanie, Shane’s wife of two years (they met at a North Carolina climbing camp), and their six-month-old son, Eli, are in attendance. To the delight of the teenagers, Shane tosses Eli high into the air and catches him over and over. The infant gurgles with pleasure. “He’s happiest when he’s in motion,” says Messer.

When the owners and managers of the Central Rock consortium were planning their Waterown outlet, Messer came to their attention. Says owner Joe Hardy, who hired Messer after a phone call to North Carolina. “Shane brings passion, athleticism, technical skill, and leadership to my gyms, but also to the climbing industry at large. He’s an integral part of our dynamic team, pushing CRG to new levels.” Adds general manager Kevin Pickren, “When Shane came up to interview, it took that one meeting for the owners to know that he was the one we needed. Shane’s experience with the U. S. national team and route setting experience at a national level made him a clear choice.”

What’s the reward of coaching, I ask Messer during a break. “Watching a kid succeed on something he’s trained hard for,” he answers. “When the moves I’ve told him to make with his feet, hands, hips, all work, you can see it on his face. He’s happy, and I’m happy.

“There are a lot of coaches who are really hard on their students,” he adds, “giving them punishments and constant criticism. They’ll say, ‘This is the only way to such-and-such.’ But what works for one kid is different from what works for another kid. This isn’t boot camp.”

So what’s the downside? A rare frown furrows his brow. “Honesty,” he replies. “A kid will ask me, ‘Do you think I can make it to Nationals?’ And sometimes I have to say, ‘I don’t think so.’ I’m not going to give them false hope. But I don’t want to make them feel bad about not getting there. It’s a yes-no balance, and it’s a bummer.”

I had wondered about burnout. Not only does Shane climb, coach, or route set virtually every day, but he and Melanie live across the street from CRG Watertown, and she works at the gym, too. “Are you kidding?” he retorts. “I’m never bored. Someone new comes to the gym every day. Every day, we hook someone new on climbing. I’m just happy to be part of that.”

]]>http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/27/coaching-the-next-generation-of-climbers/feed/0New Book Rock Paper Fire Examines the Heart of Adventurehttp://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/28/new-book-rock-paper-fire-examines-the-heart-of-adventure/
http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/28/new-book-rock-paper-fire-examines-the-heart-of-adventure/#commentsMon, 28 Oct 2013 15:28:07 +0000http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/?p=13969Rock Paper Fire: The Best of Mountain and Wilderness Writing, edited by Marni Jackson and Tony Whittome, published by The Banff Centre, 2013.

In graduate school I took half a dozen “creative writing” classes without learning much at all about how to write. And during nine years of teaching at Hampshire College, in ten or twelve different seminars, I force-fed students recipes culled from my own experience as a scrivener. I don’t think I passed on to those earnest acolytes more than a modicum of wisdom, although several of them, including Jon Krakauer, Chip Brown, and Tom Kizzia, went on to become professional journalists.

On the face of it, an anthology of pieces written by students in any kind of writers’ workshop sounds like a really bad idea. But in the Banff Centre’s Mountain and Wilderness Writing Program, thanks to the inspired leadership of editor/teachers Marni Jackson and Tony Whittome, minor miracles seem to be wrought annually. Rock Paper Fire, a collection of pieces written by students in the program, bears witness to this conflagration.

At the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, which I attend nearly every autumn, I bump into students who are in the middle of three weeks of intensive training in the Jackson-Whittome regimen. Their collaborative enthusiasm reminds me of the zeal that used to waft over our campfires at the Gunks in the early 1960s, when I was trying to learn how to climb vertical cliffs. I do recall with amusement, however, a Banff workshop session I sat in on two years ago, where my agent, Stuart Krichevsky, laid out the basic realities of making a living as a freelance writer. Hoping to temper Stuart’s cold truths, Marni Jackson pointed out, “If you sell five thousand copies of your book in Canada, you’ll make the bestseller list.” As they spoke, Steve Swenson, a workshop student, was scribbling calculations on a note pad. Steve is one of his generation’s finest mountaineers and a wildly successful engineer in his day job, and now he wanted to pen a memoir about his expeditions to Pakistan. Suddenly he blurted out, “Wait a second. You mean you can work your ass off for years, write a book that’s a bestseller, and make only twenty-three cents an hour?”

Granted, some of the contributors to Rock Paper Fire—including Bernadette McDonald, Freddie Wilkinson, Katie Ives, and Maria Coffey—were pretty experienced writers even before they signed up for the Banff program. But what makes the anthology work, I think, is that all the aspirants are wilderness junkies, some of them at the cutting edge of climbing, sea kayaking, sailing, or skiing. The fervor that animates their three weeks together, I suspect, owes much to the fact that as they critique each other’s projects, they’re engaging in the endless colloquy that lies at the heart of adventure. How did we get into this mess? How are we going to get out of it? Why do we keep doing it, knowing we could die? Why is there nothing else in life that compares?

I’ve tussled with those conundrums for almost half a century in my own writing without coming up with a coherent answer. At Banff each fall, even more than the best slide show talks or film presentations, what I relish is downing beers in the Maclab Bistro with fellow adventurers I’ve known for years or just met hours ago, weeping with laughter as we trade tales of epics we barely survived.

By now, in my more jaded moods, I like to think I’ve heard and dismissed all the specious rationalizations for why we continue to tiptoe on the edge of disaster as we play at being, in Lionel Terray’s pithy phrase, “conquerors of the useless.” But in Rock Paper Fire, I learned something new on every other page. From McDonald’s rueful meditation on Tomaž Humar’s all-but-inevitable pilgrimage toward death on a lonely Himalayan ledge. From Swenson’s account of a tragedy on Denali that he wonders to this day whether he could have prevented. From Jon Turk’s rolling the dice under the sea ice closing in on Ellesmere Island. From Niall Grimes’s linkage of grief over his mother’s death to the joyful rediscovery of his childhood crags. From Don Gillmor’s evocation of the bond between downhill speed on skis and the downward trajectory of aging. From Helen Mort’s rekindling in poetry of the transcendent climbs of Dorothy Pilley and Alison Hargreaves.

Pick up a copy. You’ll be surprised—and moved.

Rock Paper Fire: The Best of Mountain and Wilderness Writing, edited by Marni Jackson and Tony Whittome, published by The Banff Centre, 2013.

You don’t normally think of Mammoth Lakes, California, as a climbing mecca. I’d never been to Mammoth, in fact, before last September, when the Outdoor Writers Association of California (OWAC) invited me to be their “keynote speaker,” where I held forth about the joys and woes of 33 years of freelance writing. During those few days at Mammoth, along with epicurean wining and dining, halcyon hiking, and a solo round on the highest golf course in California (Sierra Star, at 8,000 feet), I recognized at once that Mammoth should be the next destination for our Old Gang of climbers.

The Gang has been meeting for the last 20 years, as we seek out a new romping ground each year for our rendezvous. The tradition was launched in the early 1990s, when, after a magazine assignment in Las Vegas, I persuaded my buddy Ed Ward, with whom I had mountaineered in Alaska and taught at Hampshire College, to come out for a fling at Red Rocks. Our core group soon included Matt Hale, who had been on Mount Huntington and in the Revelation Range with me way back when; Jon Krakauer, my writing colleague and Ed’s and my former Hampshire student; and longtime friends from western Massachusetts Chris Wejchert and Chris Gulick.

For several years we returned to Red Rocks, which offers some of the finest sandstone challenges in the country. But over the years we’ve also hit City of Rocks in Idaho, Smith Rock in Oregon, the Uintas in Utah, Tuolumne Meadows in California, Skaha in British Columbia, and even the Dolomites of Italy and the Calanques in southern France. And gradually we’ve expanded the club to include newer friends, mostly younger, including women, who regularly put us oldsters to shame on the crags.

During a week this June, eight of us congregated in a pair of swanky condos at the Snowcreek Resort, a mini-village of its own with stunning views of the cliffs just west of town, as well as Mammoth’s other golf course, called simply Snowcreek—a tricky and delightful nine-hole layout that wends its way over manicured hill and dale through the heart of the resort. Five of the six of our core contingent showed up—all except Krakauer, who was off gallivanting on Denali with Conrad Anker and a crew of expert snowboarders and skiers. (Jon had never quite gotten over failing to get up McKinley in 1987, when, on assignment for Outside, he’d written his classic comic riff, “Club Denali.” That article, in turn, led to the assignment that morphed into Into Thin Air. This year, Jon reached Denali’s summit.)

Our junior members this time around were Anne-Laure Treny, Maria José Giménez, and Michael Wejchert. Ed had befriended the two women at climbing gyms in recent years. Anne-Laure, from France, is a big-shot engineer now based in Florida who nonetheless climbs with the Gallic grace inspired by such idols as Patrick Edlinger and Catherine Destivelle. Venezuelan-born Maria José, an ambitious young climber and a poet in her spare time, makes a living translating texts from Spanish to English. She had recently landed the job of turning Catorce Veces Ocho Mil, the memoir of Edurne Pasaban, the first woman to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, into English for the Mountaineers Books. Michael, Chris’s son, was fresh off a brutal Alaskan expedition during which the cold, never rising much above forty below, had precluded attempting the breakthrough new route he and his partners coveted. In California, he was overjoyed to bask in the sun as he got up 5.12s and scary runout 5.10s with impeccable nonchalance. Ranging in age from 26 (Michael) to 70 (me, the geezer), we reveled in the sort of cross-generational badinage that graces far too few human activities.

We climbed for seven straight days on seven different crags made of four different kinds of rock (granite, quartz monzonite, basalt, and tuff). What makes Mammoth an ideal climbing destination is that if the weather’s too hot, you can bop up to subalpine Tuolumne (as we did on two days), and if it’s too cold, you head down and east to Owens River Gorge or the outcrops and boulders near Bishop. If the weather’s perfect (as it was throughout our stay, sunny skies with temperatures ranging from low 60s to low 80s), you can dip your toe in several lifetimes’ worth of excellent granite routes near town.

Mammoth Lakes owes its existence as a resort to Dave McCoy, a hydrographer who noticed how much snow fell there every winter and started a ski area on Mammoth Mountain in 1953. The place is still best known as a skiing paradise in the same league as Aspen and Sun Valley. But it’s a terrific place in which to cavort in summer as well, a hip, upscale town as sportif as Boulder, Colorado, or Bend, Oregon. Among the activities we simply didn’t have enough time to sample were some of the finest fly fishing in the West (on the Owens River and Hot Creek), mountain biking on hundreds of miles of designated trails, visiting nearby Devils Postpile National Monument (a prodigy of columnar basalt), and hiking the labyrinthine trail system that spiders through the evergreen forests surrounding Mammoth.

Indeed, in a week there, I don’t think we saw a single out-of-shape resident. Everybody we ran into seemed to be an outdoor athlete. Chris Wejchert and I paired up with a stranger on the Snowcreek golf course who turned out to be a climber happy to recommend specific routes to us, as were the waiters in two of the restaurants where we had dinner. And corny though it sounds (especially to my jaded Eastern ears), everyone we talked to was downright friendly. (If there’s a Mammoth town grouch, he must hibernate in the summer.)

The year before, I had befriended two locals, both of them freelance writers. One was David Page, who had invited me to speak at OWAC. We had dinner with him on our last night this June, as we tried to scheme up a next-year’s destination that could match Mammoth. (Bariloche? Page was all for it.) The other, Monica Prelle, supplements her writing career as the wine director for the Westin Hotel, where she hosted us for the most Lucullan of our several banquets in the town’s good restaurants.

Monica, who writes for some of the same sites and magazines as I do, is an ace extreme snowboarder and mountain biker, but she’d never really climbed before. When we invited her to our first cliff, she took off work to join us and dubiously tied in for her first foray up vertical rock. In four successive days, she progressed faster than almost any beginner I had ever been out with. By the last day, she’d bought her own harness and rock shoes. She’s now hooked on climbing, and has officially become the newest member of the Old Gang. (Bariloche next February, Monica?)

Our reunions are all about climbing, but the glue that holds them together is the story-telling and reminiscing that flow from too much wine around the campfire. Yes, about half the time we’ve camped out during our annual rendezvous, and there’s nothing like a campfire to spark the boasting and joshing that careen long into the night.

There are plenty of good Forest Service campgrounds near Mammoth, but we couldn’t resist the sybaritic temptations of our Snowcreek condos, where it was so pleasant to hang out that we several times forwent the restaurants in favor of home-cooked breakfasts and barbecues. Maria José, who worked for several years as a chef, whipped up frittatas in the morning. Chris Wejchert orchestrated a nonstop mixed grill of sausages, chops, and steaks, washed down with a jeroboam of zinfandel blend provided by Monica and a flagon of good rum smuggled up from Miami by Anne-Laure.

During our reunions, we slip into our by-now prescribed personae. Ed is the strongest climber among us oldsters, blithely leading trad 5.10s and the occasional 5.11 at an age when, thanks to missing knee cartilage, he can climb better than he can walk. Matt has become the Weegee of our outings, sneaking around the cliffs with his Nikon lenses and catching us in poses we never knew we struck. Chris Wejchert, burstingly proud of the fact that his son has become one of New England’s top mountaineers, at the same time wonders whether it was wise to infect his kid with the hazardous summit fever that animated his own youth. Chris Gulick is an inexhaustible source of stories about our hijinks in the 1970s and ‘80s, tales that only get more Rabelaisian each time he tells them. (All the more fun, as Maria José, Anne-Laure, and Michael had never heard them before.)

What’s great about it all is that we’re still climbing, some us more than half a century after we first tied into a goldline rope with a bowline on a coil. Still climbing rock, long after we’ve abandoned our dreams of glory on the touch football field or the basketball court.

All too soon this June, it was time to leave. In seven days together, we hadn’t had a cross word or a leader fall long enough to scare either climber or belayer. A month later, scattered to the corners of our ordinary lives, we’re still e-mailing each other and trading photos, closing, as often as not, “Yeah, Mammoth was great.”

Hey Gang, I have a proposal. Bariloche can wait. I still want to climb on Psycho Killer Rock and Gong Show Crag, and I want to see Ed leading 5.10s after he’s turned 70. Let’s head back to Mammoth in 2014. Whaddya say?

So you’ve run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon on a private trip, after waiting a decade for a permit, then jockeying with the hordes of other rafters for prime campsites. Or you’ve done the Middle Fork of the Salmon. Or maybe the Chattooga, as you fantasized about the fate of the four Georgia buddies in Deliverance. Maybe you’ve trundled down the Allagash in Maine in an Old Town Canoe. Or you were brave enough to tackle the Alsek as it thunders past subarctic glaciers in Alaska.

But have you thought about Deso?

Listen to the names that cowboys and river rats bestowed over the decades on this 85-mile stretch of the Green River in Utah, a litany out of Zane Grey, with a touch of Tolkien: Moonwater Rapids, Firewater Rapids, Last Chance Rapids, Lion Hollow, Cow Swim, Little Horse Bottom, Beaver Slide Bottom, Gold Hole, Duches Hole, Lighthouse Rock, Nefertiti Rock, Log Cabin Rapids, Stone Canyon Rapids, Chandler Falls, Fretwater Falls. The lyricism of that nomenclature owes almost nothing to the men who first ran this stretch of the Green in 1869. John Wesley’s Powell’s crew were spooked by the place, and after a few days under its soaring walls, as Powell later wrote, “We are minded to call this the Canyon of Desolation.”

Desolation Canyon it remains today, or Deso, in the river runners’ fond shorthand. To my mind, and to those of my seven companions, there was nothing at all desolate about the canyon—it seemed instead a paradise. During nine days this May, we floated Deso under the expert supervision of Sheri Griffith Expeditions, a river-running company out of Moab. Our three guides rowed the rafts, set up camp, cooked our sumptuous meals, regaled us with shaggy river tales, and cleaned the shores spic-and-span every morning. It was I, however, who designed the trip, so that we could spend every minute off the boats hiking the side canyons, in search of the little-known structures and rock art left behind more than seven centuries ago by the Fremont, those mysterious northern neighbors of the Anasazi.

Desolation Canyon, Utah; Photograph by Matt Hale

In carving Deso, the Green cuts a meandering gorge through the lofty, convoluted Tavaputs Plateau. At its most profound, near the mouth of Rock Creek, the defile is as deep as the Grand Canyon. The left bank belongs to the Uintah and Ouray Ute Indian Reservation, the second-largest in the country. On the right spill the rugged side canyons known to few except the ranchers who ran their cattle there starting in the 1890s. A true wilderness—and every jaunt we made away from the rafts yielded unexpected discoveries.

Our trip leader, Marshall Dvorscak, was a tall, fit 32-year-old who, growing up in Cody, Wyoming, knew from his first inner-tube floats at age ten on Sage Creek that all he wanted to do in life was be a river guide. He’d run Deso about a dozen times before our trip, but showed no signs of getting jaded. “It’s about the clients,” he told me. “I get to hang out with people I’d never normally meet.”

Forty-year-old Utah native Brenda Milligan, the company’s operations manager, had been down Deso forty or fifty times before, but she too was jazzed about the unusual design of our trip. After college, she had thought she’d wangle a “real job,” but, as she said, “I had to do a couple more river trips, then a couple more. Pretty soon I knew I was in it for the long run.” A pivotal moment in her life came when she dreamed that she was cruising down the Green and (in her words) not respecting the river. A river god appeared out of nowhere, took away her rafts, and told her she had to hike out. But the god relented, gave her her boats back, and let her finish the trip. This May, “respecting the river” was Brenda’s constant mantra, a state of mind and spirit she managed to impart to even the most skeptical of our gang of eight.

Twenty-two-year-old Stephanie Berg, from upstate New York, had drawn the assignment of training on this trip to become a trip leader. Her calm demeanor leavened the sometimes manic bonhomie of our camps.

The rapids in Deso aren’t as serious as those in Cataract Canyon or Grand Canyon, but they gave me pause, in large part because I have never learned how to swim. In the middle of Joe Hutch Canyon Rapids, pulling hard, Marshall broke an oar. “Hold on!” he yelled, while he deftly unslung a spare, slotted it into the oar lock, and cranked us to safety. “We always could have high-sided,” he mused.

On our eighth day, we scouted Coal Creek Rapids, as Marshall and Brenda plotted the narrow line between a hole on the right and dangerous rocks on the left. “If we go into the hole,” said Brenda, “we’d wrap for sure, maybe flip.” Holding on for dear life, I saw only frothing whitecaps as we bounced and glided through the maelstrom—the three rafts taking three different lines, as we emerged wet but unscathed.

Sheri Griffith runs a classy operation. Our camps on sandbars were cheered late into the night with fire-pan blazes of store-bought pine logs mixed with driftwood sticks. The last two nights, we played horseshoes, with Marshall proving himself—pun intended—a ringer at the sport. For dinners, our tireless waitpersons served us lasagna and barbecued chicken; for breakfast, French toast and omelettes; for lunch, hoagies, wraps, and chef’s salad. Desserts ranged from banana cream pie to pineapple upside-down cake. The rafts had so much storage space that we were able to lug and consume beer and wine in quantities that it would embarrass me to confess in print. The holds kept ice frozen long enough so that on our last night, the Tecates were cold and the steaks were fresh. And oh, yes: 115 gallons of drinking water, since the Green is too brown to drink except out of desperation.

Desolation Canyon, Utah; Photograph by Matt Hale

Gliding from one new vista to the next, on the first day alone we spotted wild horses, a juvenile bighorn sheep, majestic blue herons, gaggles of geese and ducks, and a flock of eight pelicans that we chased downstream. Swifts and swallows flitted overhead. A dead bison—Marshall speculated that it might have broken through the ice attempting a winter crossing—floated down the river with us, lapping and being lapped by our rafts.

The BLM limits launches in Deso to six teams per day in summer, two per day in late spring and early fall. Most of the time, we had the Green to ourselves and could camp wherever we fancied. The bread and butter of the rafting companies in Deso is midsummer floats lasting four or five days, mostly with families, with an emphasis on splashing through rapids and bobbing in life jackets beside the boats. Only the most accessible ruins and rock art panels get visited, and it’s rare for clients to stroll more than a quarter mile away from the river.

Desolation Canyon, Utah; Photograph by Matt Hale

The central focus of our own trip, on the other hand, lay in prowling up the side canyons and from ledge to cliff ledge in search of Fremont wonders.I had come armed with a finding aid—a redacted survey report that Jerry Spangler’s Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance teams had compiled over the course of five grueling seasons in the field. I promised Spangler, whom I had interviewed for a previous article, that I would give away the locations of none of the vulnerable Desolation sites that our group was lucky enough to find.”

So we spent day after day forging up the tributaries, searching for obscure prehistoric wonders. The Fremont are far less well understood than the Anasazi, and what Spangler calls the local Tavaputs Adaptation embodies conundrums no one has yet solved. We found many granaries—top-loading cists made of sandstone slabs and mud mortar—in which the ancients stored their corn, beans, squash, and wild seeds. But unlike the Anasazi, the Fremont hid their granaries in all but invisible nooks. Each site, then, posed a quest. And while we failed to find some of Spangler’s granaries, we stumbled upon others that his surveyors had never discovered.

In nine days, however, we found only two possible living structures—a faint grid of three pithouses on an open shelf, and a butte-top lookout tower with hyper-defensive dry-laid walls. And we found but a single tiny potsherd, a nondescript chunk of Emery grayware.

That’s the puzzle of the Tavaputs Adaptation—why so many granaries, some of them huge, and yet almost no pottery? (How else would the Fremont have carried and cooked their corn?) Why so many granaries, and so few places to live? Three of the granaries, in particular, seemed almost impossible to get to. Only master climbers risking their lives daily could have gotten into those eyries, let alone built structures and stored their food there.

Unfazed by the rigor of their non-stop camp chores, Brenda and Marshall threw themselves into our sleuthing, and burst into exclamations of delight at each new find. Despite her forty-plus trips down Deso, most of the Fremont sites we visited Brenda had never seen before.

Around AD 1000, hundreds, maybe thousands, of men, women, and children lived in Desolation Canyon. But in 2013, no one lives there. For us, just as haunting as the Fremont presence were the ruins of the two great ranches that flourished in the canyon from the 1910s through the 1960s—the Rock Creek Ranch at the mouth of a crystalline sidestream, and, fourteen miles downriver, the Cradle M Ranch at the mouth of Florence Creek. Strolling by the half-collapsed buildings, touching nothing, we marveled at the stonework of a hired hand named Frenchy, who built even chicken coops with the care of a Machu Picchu mason.

Waldo Wilcox had spent the first eleven years of his life at the Cradle M. As an adult, for fifty years he had fiercely guarded his ranch up Range Creek in the West Tavaputs plateau, leaving all the “Indian stuff” in place, so that when he finally sold his spread to the state of Utah, the archaeologists were stunned to discover the most pristine prehistoric landscape in all the Southwest. I had written about Waldo for National Geographic Adventure (see “The Cowboy’s Indians,” March 2007), and he had become both a friend and the object of my admiration. Before our trip last May, Waldo told me many a story about Deso that even Jerry Spangler knew nothing about.

About Tabyago, for whom a side canyon is named, a Ute Indian who went insane. (Said Waldo, “They long-roped him to a tree and he died there. Them Utes was real superstitious about crazy men.”) About old Ben Morris, who ran a still in Firewater Canyon during Prohibition. (“Quite a character. Left Oklahoma for his health. They would’ve hanged him if he stayed.”) About his great-uncles, who drowned crossing the Green. (“They tried to go too straight, got flipped off. Only their dog came home.”) About the supposed Ute burial that river runners show their clients. (“I camped in that cave back in the ‘forties. There wasn’t no burial there then. I think the boaters put it there. Show folks a dead Indian.”) About his grandfather’s coziness with the outlaws. (“Grand-dad said Butch Cassidy never died in South America. He seen him up here.”)

All too soon, our nine days were coming to an end. On the last evening, our guides pulled out a duffel bag full of halloween costumes and thrift-shop throwaways and encouraged us to dress up. Within minutes, we looked (and acted) like extras from a forgettable B-movie: Animal House meets Blame It on Rio, perhaps.

Heraclitus was right: you can’t raft the same river twice. “Every flash flood in a side canyon,” Marshall told me, “spills big boulders into the Green. They change the rapids completely.” As for the Tavaputs itself—the Fremont knew the place better than we ever will. In nine days of zealous searching, we had found fewer than one-tenth of the sites Spangler had surveyed, and no doubt not even one-hundredth of what the ancients had left behind.

Several afternoons, as I lay on my back and gazed at the craggy ridges soaring as high as two thousand feet above our shoreline camps, I thought, It would take many lifetimes to explore this wilderness. This May, I was happy to spend just a small part of the only lifetime I’ll have scratching the surface of Desolation Canyon.

Sheri Griffith Expeditions runs 2-5 day rafting trips on Labyrinth, Cataract, Westwater, the Yampa, and Gates of Lodore Canyons, as well as Desolation. (Because of the unfortunate connotations of “Desolation,” the trip from Sand Wash to Swasey’s Landing on the Green River is listed as “Majestic Canyons” in the Griffith catalogue.)

There’s a moment in Sender Films’s new documentary Honnold 3.0 that is utterly terrifying to watch. At age 27, Alex Honnold has emerged as the world’s premier free-solo rock climber. In the film, he’s in the first leg of his “Yosemite Triple”—an attempt to climb the three biggest faces in the Valley, Mount Watkins, El Capitan, and Half Dome, in record time. Back-to-back through the night. Solo. And almost the whole way without the aid of a rope or fixed pitons or bolts to clip.

Honnold calls it “daisy-soloing.” On all but the very hardest moves, he’s pure free soloing. If he falls, he dies. But on the really dicey spots—pendulums, roofs seeping with rainwater, 5.12 moves on slopers—he’ll clip in briefly to a fixed piece of protection with his nylon daisy-chain, and even grab that piece to swing upward a few feet, before unclipping and re-entering the free-solo void.

Perhaps a thousand feet up the south face on Mount Watkins, Honnold has the fingers of his right hand clamped to a small hold above his head. With his left hand, he’s reaching gingerly to clip the chain to a bolt to his left. The camera seems to be only six feet away. Only the upper half of Honnold’s body is in the frame. The concentration on his face is elemental.

Honnold stretches his arm as far as he can reach. He’s two inches short of clipping the bolt.

And then his foot slips. Honnold’s body lurches downward six or eight inches, then comes to a sudden stop. The look in his eyes never changes. He reaches again, clips his ‘biner to the bolt, and swings his weight onto it.

When Honnold 3.0 screened at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival this November, at the moment of that foot-slip the audience of 950 adventure junkies in the Eric Harvie Theatre uttered a collective gasp, pierced with a few groans and shrieks. I’d gotten to know Alex pretty well when I hung out with him for a week at Smith Rock in Oregon in 2010, as I profiled him for Outside magazine. I must have asked him five or six times, “What if you slip and fall?”

Alex had his pat answer: “It’ll be the worst five seconds of my life.”

In the Eric Harvie Theatre, after the showing of Honnold 3.0, producer-director Peter Mortimer came on stage to answer questions. From the audience, I asked, “What did Alex say later about that foot slip on Watkins?”

“He didn’t even remember it,” Mortimer answered. Another gasp from the crowd. “We put a clip of it up on You Tube. After Alex saw it, he called me. ‘Hey, dude, I do 7,500 feet of rock climbing in one day, and you choose the one moment where my foot slips!’”

Mortimer adds, “I pressed him about it. ‘It was no big deal,’ Alex answered. ‘I had a solid hold for my right hand.’” Among his Yosemite pals, I knew, the climbing prodigy had acquired a nickname: Alex “No Big Deal” Honnold.

Just four years ago, Honnold was a nobody. He’d pulled off his first two colossal free solos—of Moonlight Buttress (5.12d) in Zion and the northwest face of Half Dome (5.12) in Yosemite—with an audience of zero, having told only a friend or two about his upcoming projects the day before he pulled them off.

Peter Mortimer, the founder of Sender Films, took notice and got in touch with Honnold. Despite insisting on his love of privacy, Alex agreed to recreate the two great solos for a film. Alone on the Wall, which appeared in 2009, quickly won major prizes at festivals, including Mountainfilm in Telluride, the Trento Film Festival in Italy, and the Kendal Mountain Film Festival in England.

Thanks in large part to Sender Films, Honnold quickly became a celebrity, appearing on the cover of National Geographic and in a feature on 60 Minutes, during which a smitten Lara Logan caresses Alex’s fingertips as she tries to divine from them the secret of Honnold’s genius.

At the Banff festival this November, Honnold 3.0 won the prize for Best Climbing Film. Appearing on stage, Mortimer magnanimously claimed, “This award goes to Alex. He’s the one making the magic happen. We were just fortunate to follow him around.”

Despite his “aw-shucks” modesty, Pete Mortimer is in the process of redefining the adventure-film genre. At Banff this November, the documentaries his teams produced won an unprecedented three different prizes. Besides Honnold 3.0 for the Best Climbing Film, Wide Boyz—a whimsical journey with two British lads determined to break the sound barrier of off-width crack climbing—won the Best Short Mountain film award, and La Dura Dura, which covers the grunting, shrieking duel of Chris Sharma and Adam Ondra on what may be the hardest single-pitch rock climb in the world, took home the coveted People’s Choice prize for Radical Reels. Appearing onstage to receive his third glass trophy of the night, Mortimer was scolded by the presenter, “Pete, this is getting a little ridiculous.”

Although Mortimer founded Sender Films only in 2005, his small team of indie filmmakers has indeed already won a ridiculously long list of prizes worldwide, at festivals not only in Banff, Telluride, Kendal, and Trento, but also Taos, Boulder, Sheffield and Edinburgh (U. K.), Squamish and Vancouver and Montreal (Canada), Ushuaia (Argentina), Graz (Austria), Torelló (Spain), and New Zealand and Australia.

The REEL ROCK tour, which Mortimer launched with fellow adventure filmmaker Josh Lowell shortly after founding Sender, is currently the hottest thing of its kind. At a showing of its latest installment, REEL ROCK 7, in a funky old armory building in Somerville, Massachusetts, I was amazed to see gaggles of twelve-year-old girls—the very kids you’d expect to line up for The Hunger Games or The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—hanging on every screen sequence that captured the antics of Honnold, Sharma, or Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker on the Shark’s Fin in the Garhwal Himalaya.

What’s the recipe for Sender, REEL ROCK, and Mortimer’s success? It’s some amalgamation of humor, fast pacing and clever editing, unrehearsed sound bites from athletes caught close-up during bursts of manic performance, all leavened by the authenticity of real risk and genuine adventure. Mortimer is not the Warren Miller of today’s adventure films. His features are compulsively watchable without being slick. No one would ever call “La Dura Dura” climbing porn. Whatever the key to the “magic” is, it belongs to Mortimer as much as to such protagonists as Honnold.

And it seems to be grounded in Mortimer’s character. At Banff and shortly afterward, I caught up with the filmmaker, hoping to probe his technique and his vision—if so artsy a term can be applied to such a down-home guy. What I found was a 38-year-old man, married, with one kid and another on the way, who emanates the enthusiasm of a youngster who’s just discovered what he loves doing most in life, and can’t quite believe that people will pay the price of admission to watch him do it.

From the outset, however, Mortimer insisted on sharing the credit for his achievement. “All our films are deep collaborations,” he told me, “and while I have a big role, what makes the REEL ROCK program so strong is that Josh Lowell and Nick Rosen are going deep with me. On La Dura Dura, for instance, a team of cameramen spent months filming. Then, after we structured the piece, Josh plunged far into the edit while I gave notes and feedback. I think what has taken our films so far beyond my early stuff is the group dynamic and what we all bring to the table.”

* * *

Pete Mortimer started climbing at age 14 in his native Boulder, Colorado, at Fairview High, where climbing legend Roger Briggs was the physics teacher. The school offered a “class” that snagged phys-ed credit for a whole day’s play at Eldorado once a week. At Colorado College (CC), though he majored in geology, Mortimer gravitated to a video class. At CC he also became close buddies with his fellow students and future collaborators, Rosen and Lowell.

After a few years working at the New York Film Academy, where he learned his trade from the ground up (“I spent a lot of time cleaning cameras”), Mortimer headed to USC for grad school in filmmaking. It was here that his two roads diverged in the proverbial yellow wood. “I could have gone the conventional route,” Mortimer reflects, “catching on with a Hollywood studio as an assistant and slowly working my way up. Or I could do my own thing.”

His own thing was making indie films. And his passion was still climbing. Scraping together $10,000, Mortimer made his first real film, called Scary Faces, about a small coterie of pals trying to lead a dangerous run-out route called Jules Verne at Eldorado. He wangled a screening at the Boulder Theater, sponsored by Rock and Ice magazine. “I was so nervous,” Mortimer remembers. “The theater holds nine hundred seats. I was sure nobody would show up. My parents bought sixty tickets, just to guarantee that somebody would be in the audience. And the night of the screening, it was snowing.

“When I showed up, the line stretched four blocks long. They had to turn people away. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like a whole new concept—an entire community turning out to see a rock climbing film.”

In 2003, Mortimer produced Front Range Freaks, a single DVD showcasing seven short films. Compared to Sender’s films today, Freaks seems raw and a little haphazard, but the Mortimer stamp is there—lots of fast-motion footage, pulsating music, ad-libbed asides as the subject mugs for the camera, and above all, zany humor. The touchstone piece on the DVD is “Urban Ape,” which consists of little more than Timmy O’Neill buildering all over Boulder and Denver as he fires off wisecracks, blowing the minds of pedestrians and policemen in the process. You can’t turn it off.

Characteristically, Mortimer salutes O’Neill’s gift for comedy as making the film soar, rather than his own talent as a cinematographer and screenwriter.

In his first years of filming climbers around Boulder, Mortimer often got stood up by the local rock stars, some of whom he had looked up to as heroes. But after the suprising success of “Front Range Freaks,” which won prizes at Banff, Vancouver, Telluride, Taos, and Kendal, Mortimer and his colleagues had no trouble garnering the collaboration of far more famous climbers, including Dean Potter, Ueli Steck, Chris Sharma, and Steph Davis. “All these folks want to share their feats with a larger public,” Mortimer insists.

In 2006 Mortimer lured his college pal Nick Rosen back from grad school at Columbia University to help him write and produce. Rosen agreed to a salary of fifteen grand for a six months’ trial, during which he lived in a room in Mortimer’s house. With the pair’s founding of Sender Films, Mortimer and Co. hit the fast track. Meanwhile, “We started to see the potential of screening tours.” REEL ROCK arrived in 2006, as Mortimer and Rosen teamed up with Josh Lowell, who had started his own film company, Big Up Productions. From forty shows around the country in its initial year, the tour has burgeoned to 400 venues in 2012-13. And, as I saw at the Somerville armory, most of those screenings sell out, and a substantial portion of the audience is young. Very young: from six to sixteen. “Those kids get it,” says Mortimer. “They get the connection between Conrad Anker and Adam Ondra.”

* * *

With its zany, wisecracking, sheer funhoggery, the Sender Films “message” could easily have become a shtick. Yet Mortimer, like every other devotee who laces up his rock shoes and ties in to a rope, had to confront the reality that climbing is dangerous, that far too many of its practitioners die on the crags and in the mountains. Amidst the levity of Front Range Freaks, Dirty Bird, a moving tribute to Derek Hersey, the pioneering free soloist who fell to his death in Yosemite in 1993, stands out for its somber avoidance of the clichés of sorrow and bereavement.

In 2010, Sender Films put out a boxed set of six DVDs under the title “First Ascent: The Series.” The compilation is Mortimer’s magnum opus to date. By far the hardest of the films to produce was Point of No Return. In 2009, Jonny Copp and Micah Dash, two of Boulder’s most ambitious climbers, set off to climb Mount Dojitsenga in Tibet. When their permit fell through, they shifted their objective to the little-known, unclimbed east face of Mount Edgar in western China.

Copp and Dash were close friends and climbing buddies of Mortimer and his colleagues. The plan was for the two to shoot videos of their voyage in to base camp and up on the wall, to be edited by Sender once they returned. To enhance the footage, Mortimer and Rosen asked Wade Johnson—a young cameraman with little climbing experience—to tag along. Johnson had no intentions of going up on the face itself.

Mount Edgar turned out to be hideously dangerous, with barrages of falling rock coming down during all the hours of day and night. After weeks of waiting out storms, Copp and Dash reluctantly agreed to abandon the climb. On the verge of heading home, all three men hiked up toward the base of the wall to retrieve gear they had cached. And sometime during that short foray, a gigantic avalanche swept the face, killing all three men. The bodies of Copp and Johnson were later found, but Dash’s was not.

The search teams, including Nick Rosen, found extensive video footage in the trio’s base camp. Back in Boulder, Mortimer and Rosen agonized over whether to call off the whole project, or turn it into a film. And they suffered enormous guilt over having sent Wade Johnson to China—even though Johnson was eager to go.

“We finally decided to go ahead with it,” says Mortimer, “when Wade’s mother told us, ‘If you can make the film, do it.’ She’d always wanted to go to the Himalaya herself.”

Point of No Return is excruciating to watch, because we know how the story ends. In Boulder, Copp and Dash goof around for the camera even as they work out training for Mount Edgar. Every pronouncement from their lips seems fraught with impending doom. Copp says that thanks to all his experience in the mountains, “I feel that I can get myself out of anything I get myself into.” Both men talk about how hard it is to leave their girlfriends, and there’s an extended scene at the airport as Copp and his sweetheart hold a passionate embrace.

At base camp, the men wait through weeks of storm, growing more and more discouraged. The rocks falling around them are pregnant with warning. Yet even in the rain, the men dance and sing as Copp plays a wooden flute. Then the weather changes. “Holy shit!” one of them yells. “It’s clearing! Let’s go!”

Yet caution prevails. Copp: “I’ve been in two avalanches in my life. I don’t want to get caught in another avalanche . . . . We don’t want a fifty-fifty chance of dying. That’s not a manageable number.”

In the end, they make the right decision—to give up. There’s only that one last hike to perform, to retrieve their cache . . . .

Watching the film for the first time, I screamed internally, Leave the fucking gear! Just go home!

Had Sender Films produced a dramatic recreation of the Mount Edgar tragedy, all those lines the men deliver would have been pilloried as heavy-handed foreshadowing. But we’re constantly aware that none of the men’s talk was rehearsed. It’s what they really said to each other as they waited out the storms. It’s what the film canisters contained when the rescue team retrieved them. It captures the ambivalence at the heart of every daring adventure.

Point of No Return achieves an ending that earns its affirmation, as back in Boulder, the friends of the three victims gather to celebrate their short lives. They cheer and yell, even as they weep.

I’ve never seen a film quite like it.

* * *

By early 2010, I was vaguely aware of Sender Films and Alex Honnold, but when I served on the film jury at Telluride that May, both the climber and the film company leapt onto my radar. Alone on the Wall so easily outdistanced the other entries for the Charlie Fowler Adventure Award that my fellow jurors and I didn’t hesitate in unanimously giving it the prize.

Alone on the Wall is also Sender’s most successful film to date. In getting the private purist that Alex was back in 2009 to agree to recreate for the camera his astonishing free solos of Moonlight Buttress and the northwest face of Half Dome, Mortimer scored a coup. But it was a triumph that took brilliant climbing choreography to pull off, as the cameramen had to rappel into position to document Alex’s daring moves from only a few feet away. The film succeeds not simply because it captures Alex’s “magic,” but because, like Point of No Return, it raises fundamental questions about life and death.

I’ve showed my copy of Alone on the Wall to several dozen non-climbing friends. At least half of them have said something like, “This is sick. Doesn’t he realize he’s going to kill himself?” Several have declared, 15 minutes in, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t watch this.” On my tenth viewing, even I find my palms sweating.

At Banff, five months after Telluride, I met Mortimer for the first time, as I researched my Honnold profile for Outside. With Alex sitting nearby, I asked Mortimer about the responsibility involved in pressuring the soloist to perform for the camera.

“I worry for sure about what we’re asking him to do,” Mortimer answered. “If we pose him on a wall, and he slips and falls and dies, I’d feel one-hundred percent responsible.”

To which Alex quipped, “Yeah, but if I fell 70 feet and broke my ankle, you’d say, ‘Great! Can you do it again?’”

We all three laughed. But when the Outside fact-checkers ran the exchange by Mortimer, he balked. Did he come across as insincere, even pious? To his credit, he never denied that the conversation had taken place, and Outside ran with it.

Honnold 3.0, the new REEL ROCK film that climaxes with Alex’s Yosemite Triple, represents an even more remarkable cinematic coup. Alone on the Wall was a recreation of two climbs. To capture Alex on his race up the faces of Mount Watkins, El Capitan, and Half Dome, the filmmakers had to be there when it happened. There would be no recreations, no second takes.

Mortimer explained to me how he pulled it off. “This was a feat that could not be covered by only two or three cameramen, no matter how skillful they were,” he said. “We needed to pinpoint the key spots on the three climbs, and get in position to be ready when Alex came by. So we hired ten different cameramen, and we chose Alex’s climbing buddies, even if they weren’t that experienced at shooting, just so Alex would feel more comfortable with their presence. We had to be on El Cap in the dark.

“For example, Cheyne Lempe rope-soloed up to the Boot Flake on the Nose, then just waited. He could see Alex’s headlamp as he approached, and he got those hundred feet of critical footage. As Alex climbed by, he said, ‘Hey, Cheyne, how’s it going?’

“Sean Leary, who’s climbed a lot with Alex, rapped down six hundred feet from the top to the Great Roof. He’s such a good climber that he jugged those six hundred feet, shooting Alex all the way to the top.

“Even so, there was some great stuff we missed. When he started up the Nose in the dark, Alex forgot his chalk bag. Rather than waste time rapping down to get it, he climbed on. Ran into some guys bivouacking on the Sickle Ledge. They took one look and said, ‘God, it’s Alex Honnold.’ He said sheepishly, ‘Hey guys, I forgot my chalk bag. Do you think I could borrow—‘

“’Yeah, yeah, take it, of course,’ they answered. ‘It’s an honor.’ The minute Alex was gone, they called their wives on their cell phones to tell them what happened.

“I would have given anything to have caught that moment on film, but we just weren’t there.”

* * *

Right now, Sender Films, the REEL ROCK Tour, and Peter Mortimer’s team are at the top of their game. So what comes next?

The big project on the drawing table—seven years in the making, with a scheduled release date of spring 2014—will be called Valley Uprising. It’s a comprehensive history of climbing in Yosemite, melding together vintage stills and clips with the best new footage Sender can craft.

Recently Mortimer and Rosen gave me a sneak peek at a two-minute clip from Valley Uprising. It’s pretty damn exciting. To make a slightly far-fetched analogy, if the clip is representative of the whole, it’ll be as if Ken Burns had played second base for the Red Sox before retiring to produce Baseball.

And a year and a half from now, I’m pretty sure, those twelve-year-old girls in the audience, who have never before heard of Yvon Chouinard or Royal Robbins, will be biting their knuckles as they watch how the Gods of Camp Four danced up vertical rock, decades before they were born.

See the Sender Films team on CBS This Morning:

]]>http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/11/28/return-to-sender/feed/5Last Words Missing—The Mystery of Sir John Franklin and Polar History’s Greatest Catastphrophehttp://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/30/last-words-missing-the-mystery-of-sir-john-franklin-and-polar-historys-greatest-catastphrophe/
http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/30/last-words-missing-the-mystery-of-sir-john-franklin-and-polar-historys-greatest-catastphrophe/#commentsFri, 30 Mar 2012 15:48:35 +0000http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/?p=10012H.M.S. Intrepid, under the command of Irish explorer Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, is trapped in pack ice in Baffin Bay, circa 1853. McClintock is on his first mission to find the 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin, which disappeared during a search for the Northwest Passage. From a sketch by Commander May R.N. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

More than six decades before Scott reached the South Pole, Sir John Franklin led an expedition into the Canadian Arctic that would turn into the greatest catastrophe in polar history. Attempting the long-sought Northwest Passage, the hypothesized shortcut from Europe to Asia, Franklin set off from England in 1845 with two powerful steam-driven ships, the Erebus and the Terror, in charge of 128 officers and men. It was the strongest expedition ever launched in the Arctic, and the Admiralty was confident of success.

When the summers of 1846 and 1847 passed with no word from Franklin’s party, the Royal Navy launched a massive search. Over the following years, dozens of relief missions, both British and American, sailed and marched overland into the Canadian Arctic looking for clues. It was not until 1850 that one of these parties found the remains of Franklin’s first winter camp, along with the graves of three seamen, on the coast of Beechey Island. But that team found no written record of the expedition’s progress through the spring of 1846.

It was not until 1854 that a surveyor, doctor John Rae, met Inuit (Eskimo) near King William Island who carried artifacts from the doomed expedition and related grim stories about the demise of Franklin’s men. And it was not until 1859 that another explorer, Francis Leopold McClintock, found a single piece of paper enclosed in a tin container in a cairn on King William Island, on which was scrawled the sole surviving record of what happened to Franklin and his men.

That record is so maddeningly brief and vague that ever since, it has served as a Delphic riddle from which generations of historians have launched their wildly speculative narratives. On the piece of paper, James Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, penned a few lines giving the latitude and longitude of the first overwintering, ending, “All well. Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the Ships on Monday 24 May 1847.” A second entry, added almost a year later, curls around the margins of the paper. It reveals that the ships were abandoned on April 22, 1848, having first been frozen into the sea ice in September 1846, then closes, “Sir John Franklin died on 11 June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.” A last postscript reads, “And start tomorrow 26th for Backs Fish River.”

Five years earlier, the Inuit had told John Rae that their brethren had watched the sailors slowly starve and die of scurvy on King William Island. (The Britishers refused to eat the fat and internal organs of seal and walrus that kept the Inuit healthy.) The natives further testified that in extremis, Franklin’s men had cannibalized each other.

England blamed the messenger: Rae was vilified in the newspapers. In high dudgeon, Charles Dickens accused the “lying savages,” whose testimony was “the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people,” of murdering the sailors and concocting the cannibalism story to cover their crime. No one wanted to believe that stalwart British citizens might resort to eating each other.

Over the century and a half since McClintock’s discovery of the note, many more Franklin relics and several graves and scattered bones have been found along the track of the men’s desperate retreat south from King William Island. Forensic study of the bones has proved beyond a doubt that the Inuit claim of extensive cannibalism was true. But not a single further note or diary page has come to light. And despite intensive underwater searches in recent years, no trace of the Erebus or Terror has yet been found.

Among the 129 men aboard the ships, probably all the officers and many of the men kept diaries. Some of them may also have written down a full account of their plight after the ships were locked in ice. Lady Jane Franklin, who knew the very shape and feel of her husband’s diary, offered a reward of £700 for its recovery.

What happened to all the records? Rae suggested that the Inuit, who had a superstitious fear of paper with writing on it, may have thrown them away or destroyed them. The last words of Franklin and his men, written on the wind, have vanished forever. Only the mystery remains.

]]>http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/30/last-words-missing-the-mystery-of-sir-john-franklin-and-polar-historys-greatest-catastphrophe/feed/2Explorers’ Last Words and Technology: From Robert Falcon Scott to Rob Hallhttp://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/29/explorers-last-words-and-technology-from-robert-falcon-scott-to-rob-hall/
http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/29/explorers-last-words-and-technology-from-robert-falcon-scott-to-rob-hall/#commentsThu, 29 Mar 2012 13:56:11 +0000http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/?p=9983Members of the Robert F. Scott expedition standing in front of Roald Amundsen's tent at the South Pole, 1912. Photograph courtesy Library of Congress

“Great God! This is an awful place,” wrote Robert Falcon Scott in his diary on January 17, 1912. Just hours before, Scott and his four companions had reached the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen’s team had beaten them there by a month.

Nine weeks later, doomed by a combination of starvation, scurvy, and hypothermia, Scott and his last two surviving teammates lay marooned in a tent. A nine-day storm prevented their sledging the last eleven miles to a food depot that might have saved their lives. Scott knew he was going to die, and he kept writing in his diary until the very end. He prepared a “message to the public” that closed, “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale . . . .”

The last to die, Scott was determined to leave the best record possible of his team’s gallant and tragic adventure. Today, March 29, marks the centenary of his final entry. He closed the passage thus: “I do not think we can hope for any better things. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.” Then, with the pencil almost falling out of his hand, he wrote, “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” Yet he added a final cry of despair: “For God’s sake look after our people.”

More than three weeks earlier, the ship that had come down to Antarctica to pick up the expedition personnel had to steam out of McMurdo Sound, bound for England, for fear of getting frozen into the late-summer ice. By then, the rest of Scott’s Terra Nova team in the hut at Cape Evans were all but certain that the polar party had perished. Yet thirteen of those men volunteered to stay on, spend another nightmarish winter in Antarctica, and search for the bodies the next spring.

Heroism of this sort—and the eloquence of Scott’s diary—are in short supply today. Indeed, the race for the South Pole seems now to have a quaint, period flavor. At Scott’s “awful place,” a two-story building complex stands—the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station, complete with cafeteria, fitness center, sauna, and full-length basketball court.

In Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair, published in 1951, the protagonist, Maurice Bendrix (very much Greene’s alter ego), takes down a copy of Scott’s diary from the shelf of his dead lover’s cherished childhood books. “That had been one of my own favourite books,” Bendrix muses. “It seemed curiously dated now, this heroism with only the ice for enemy, self-sacrifice that involved no deaths beyond one’s own. Two wars stood between us and them.”

Indeed, the hundred years since Scott’s demise have changed the exploration game forever. Technological advances in connectedness have replaced Scott’s “message to the public” with Neil Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Canned, broadcast live to the world, an instant sound bite—yet in 1969, had anything gone wrong with Apollo 11, Armstrong and his two crewmates on the moon would have been as far beyond hope of rescue as Scott was on the polar plateau.

In 1996, as Rob Hall lay dying just below the summit of Mount Everest, out of reach of any rescuers, other climbers on the mountain managed to patch Hall through via radio to his wife, Jan Arnold, in New Zealand, seven months pregnant with the couple’s first child. Their last exchange had a terrible poignancy of its own, and there was nothing canned about what Hall said in his last moments alive. But dozens of others in various camps on Everest listened in live, and within days a transcript of the radio conversation was available to the public.

There was an odd note about the exchange, as Arnold, who had climbed Everest herself and knew better, said, “I’m looking forward to making you completely better when you come home,” to which Hall replied, “Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Denial? Or Arnold’s desperate last effort to get Hall to pull himself together and try to descend on his own?

During his own last days in Antarctica, Scott wrote a letter to his beloved wife, Kathleen. There was no attempt in it to sidestep the grim truth. “You know I have loved you,” Scott wrote, “you know my thoughts must have constantly dwelt on you and oh dear me you must know that quite the worst aspect of this situation is the thought that I shall not see you again. The inevitable must be faced.”

Scott had no certainty that his last camp would ever be found. Many another polar explorer has vanished forever, leaving no last words to explicate his fate. The diary was a message in a bottle, thrown into the vast ocean of the frozen continent.

It was not until November 12, 1912, more than seven months after Scott’s last entry, that a search party came upon the tent, in which the bodies of Scott and his two teammates still lay in their sleeping bags. The searchers collapsed the tent without removing the bodies, built a cairn of snow over it, and erected a memorial cross. It was, as one of the party, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, later wrote, “a grave which kings must envy.”

And the searchers retrieved Scott’s diary. In 1973, I paid my first visit to the British Library in London. Browsing in the main exhibit hall, I lingered for several minutes over the only extant copy of William Shakespeare’s signature, until a glass case in the center of the hall caught my eye. Inside the case, propped open to the last page, I found Scott’s diary. As I read the words I knew by heart, a frisson, the likes of which I had never before felt in a museum or library, crept up my spine and settled in my shoulders.

“Period” Scott’s heroism may seem today, but for me the frisson is still there. On that smudged final page, Scott managed to put down what are surely the most moving last words any explorer ever wrote. One hundred years later, they still pierce the heart.

]]>http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/29/explorers-last-words-and-technology-from-robert-falcon-scott-to-rob-hall/feed/2Patagonia’s Cerro Torre Gets the Chop: Maestri Unbolted (Photos)http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/01/29/patagonias-cerro-torre-climbing-controversy-maestri-unbolted/
http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/01/29/patagonias-cerro-torre-climbing-controversy-maestri-unbolted/#commentsMon, 30 Jan 2012 00:22:47 +0000http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2012/01/29/patagonias-cerro-torre-climbing-controversy-maestri-unbolted/
On January 16, 2012, mountaineering history was made. The actors in the drama were two of the best young alpinists alive—a 21-year-old Coloradan, Hayden Kennedy, and a 24-year-old from British Columbia, Jason Kruk. Their deed took place on a savagely steep needle of granite and rime ice in southern Patagonia called Cerro Torre. Kennedy and Kruk knew that what they were trying to do was audacious in the extreme, but they could hardly have anticipated that it would trigger the most explosive mountaineering controversy of the last decade.

By David Roberts and Kathryn Sall; Photographs by Hayden Kennedy and Jason Kruk (seen here on the summit of Cerro Torre)

Although it rises to an altitude of only 10,262 feet, Cerro Torre has been called the most beautiful mountain on earth, as well as one of the most difficult. On the border of Chile and Argentina, the peak soars nearly 5,000 feet from base to summit. The indomitable French mountaineer Lionel Terray, who made the first ascent of nearby Fitz Roy, doubted that Cerro Torre would ever be climbed. The greatest Italian climber of his day, Walter Bonatti, failed on an attempt less than halfway to the summit in 1958.

Then in 1959, Bonatti’s bitter rival, Cesare Maestri, came to Patagonia to slay the dragon via its north face. His climbing companions were his fellow Italian, Cesarino Fava, and the Austrian Toni Egger, one of the outstanding ice climbers of his day. The three set out on their attempt and reached a gunsight notch that they named “The Col of Conquest,” 1,800 feet below the summit. Having agreed to act in only a supporting role, Fava retreated alone down to Camp 3. Maestri and Egger prepared an attack on the summit. Fava settled in to wait. After three days, gusts of warm air melted the ice near the top of the mountain and set loose colossal avalanches. After three more days without any sign of his climbing partners, Fava assumed the worst. On the sixth day, to his shock and surprise, Fava discovered Maestri, sprawled and helpless in the snow, a thousand feet from Camp 3.

Maestri had an extraordinary story to tell. After three bivouacs above the Col of Conquest, he and Egger had reached the summit of the mountain that Terray deemed impossible. But on the descent, an avalanche had caught Egger in mid-rappel and swept both him and the climbing rope off the mountain. With a desperate effort, Maestri regained the fixed ropes below the Col of Conquest. But just above Camp 3, he lost his grasp and fell. When Fava found him, he was barely conscious. Fava helped his exhausted teammate stagger the rest of the way down to base camp. With Egger, Maestri claimed, had gone the men’s camera, carrying the only documentary proof of the men’s landmark ascent.

Back in Italy, Maestri recuperated fully and boasted about his amazing climb. At first, the climbing world accepted Maestri’s account and showered the exploit with accolades. Lionel Terray called the first ascent of Cerro Torre “the greatest climbing feat of all time.” But doubts soon emerged. How had Maestri and Egger climbed so skillfully, especially given the horrendous weather? The sheer steepness of the final stretch above the Col of Conquest made the wall look unclimbable, even by the finest mountaineers of the day.

Once a pioneer of clean solo climbing, Maestri turned after Cerro Torre to a new style—bolting everything he touched—that only served to undercut his claim. After a crack British team failed even to come close to making the second ascent of Cerro Torre in 1968, the doubters came clamoring.

Today, Maestri’s 1959 “ascent” of Cerro Torre is widely regarded as one of the most blatant hoaxes in mountaineering history.

* * *

To silence his skeptics, Maestri returned to Patagonia in 1970 to climb the mountain he claimed he had already conquered. With a large team, he took on the southeast ridge. Instead of climbing in conventional alpine style, Maestri fixed thousands of feet of rope. Even worse, he used a gas-powered air compressor—a device never before employed in the mountains—to drill no fewer than 400 bolts into the route, many of them on the dead vertical headwall, effectively engineering a series of bolt ladders up the beautiful granite spire. Maestri stopped only a hundred feet short of the summit, as a gigantic mushroom of rotten rime ice loomed above him, but still claimed the second ascent. Later, he dismissed that mushroom as “not really part of the mountain,” because “it’ll blow away one of these days.” Leaving the compressor bolted to the wall as a taunt to his critics and to the climbing community at large, he rappelled the route.

Maestri’s bizarre stunt backfired. The “Compressor Route,” as it is known today, only reinforced his skeptics’ suspicions that the 1959 “first ascent” was an outright hoax. In all likelihood, then, the true first ascent came in 1974, when a four-man Italian team led by Casimiro Ferrari succeeded on the west face, the route first tried by Bonatti in 1958.

* * *

During the four decades since Maestri put up the Compressor Route, scores of climbers have repeated the climb, relying on the bolt ladders. And in recent years, some of the best young mountaineers in the world have tried to climb the southeast ridge by “fair means,” without placing new bolts or using Maestri’s.

In December 2011, Hayden Kennedy and Jason Kruk arrived on the scene. Each of them had climbed in Patagonia during three or more previous seasons. After making fine ascents in fast times on other peaks in the Fitz Roy massif, they turned to Cerro Torre. And in January of this year, they made their lightning strike on the Compressor Route. On the 15th, they reached the Col of Patience halfway up the mountain (the name itself a pointed rejoinder to Maestri’s Col of Conquest on the north face). Then on the 16th, in the astonishingly fast time of only 13 hours, they completed the first “fair means” ascent of the southeast ridge, clipping only five bolts, none of which had been placed by Maestri, in places where the route would have been impossible without them. (They did admit to using two of Maestri’s bolt anchors, where it would have taken much longer to build cam and piton anchors right next to them.)

It was the descent, however, that turned a breakthrough climb into a historic controversy. As Kennedy and Kruk rappelled the route, they chopped some 125 of Maestri’s bolts from the headwall and from one of the pitches below it. In a single day, they effectively demolished the Compressor Route.

The news immediately circled the globe, thanks to online posts by such witnesses in Patagonia as climbers Colin Haley and Rolando Garibotti. On the popular climbing website Supertopo.com, Garibotti, an Argentine climber who has made as many major first ascents in the Fitz Roy massif as anyone, started a thread; in only five days, it had generated more than 1,200 responses, though still without a word from Kruk or Kennedy. A storm of pros and cons erupted amidst their silence. At first, the responders lauded the young climbers’ deed, congratulating them on restoring the mountain to something like its original state. Garibotti, their most unequivocal supporter, said that he was “impressed beyond words” by the chopping of the route. Maestri’s “act of vandalism,” he claimed, had “diminished the challenge and appeal the mountain originally and naturally presented.” By removing the bolt ladder, Garibotti felt, Kruk and Kennedy had done much “to restore the grandeur that Cerro Torre always had.” Cheers erupted across cyberspace, echoing Garibotti’s praise.

But then the critics began to emerge. Who, some wondered, were these young punk North Americans to erase a historical route and determine what was right for the rest of the climbing world? Steve Schneider, who has attempted the Compressor Route on four separate occasions, erupted: “They f*#cked a historical route that was put up before they were born.” Schneider added, “Other people think Jason and Hayden are heroes. I think they’re assholes for [chopping the route].” Gregory Crouch, author of Enduring Patagonia, describes the Compressor Route as “spectacular climbing, with plenty of superb mixed terrain, not just some 5,000-foot bolt ladder.” Crouch’s reaction to the news was “not anger per se, but disappointment, even hurt.” The Compressor Route was indeed, as Crouch put it, a “monument to the folly of man.” But Kruk and Kennedy “decided to choose for everybody else. I’m not sure that’s a wise thing to have done.”

The reaction abroad was equally vituperative. Jean-Pierre Banville, editor of the influential French journal Grimper, wondered whether Kruk and Kennedy had been seduced by the “illusion of their own importance.” He added, “These excellent climbers have deliberately destroyed a historic route that was a landmark of alpinism. These dimwits have destroyed our past.”

Yet others continued to support the pair’s bold deed. Conrad Anker, the legendary American mountaineer and North Face spokesman, who has climbed Cerro Torre, chimed in on Supertopo: “Hayden and Jason have given the mountain some of its strength back . . . and in turn have stirred the hornet’s nest . . . . This is a good progression.” Leo Dickinson, filmmaker on the 1968 British attempt and one of the first journalists to accuse Maestri of fraud, posted: “Perhaps the saddest piece of Maestri’s legacy is denying his fellow Italians their rightful place in history. Now that this ridiculous via ferrata has been removed, an ascent of Cerro Torre will have meaning once more. It will take its rightful place as one of the world’s most inaccessible summits. Please let no one put back the bolts.”

At the Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, Reinhold Messner, the most famous mountaineer alive, heard the news from Patagonia. According to top American climber Cedar Wright, who was there, “When asked what he thought about the ascent, Messner was very excited about it and endorsed the chopping of the route with a big smile and two thumbs up.” In 1971, outraged by the Compressor Route, Messner had published a polemic called “The Murder of the Impossible.” It remains one of the most influential declarations of mountaineering ethics ever written.

Colin Haley, who watched the climb from the base of the mountain, later weighed in: “The Compressor Route was THE biggest mistake in the entire history of climbing, and it was committed on the world’s most beautiful mountain. People have been talking about removing Maestri’s bolts since the day they were put in, over forty years ago. Until Hayden and Jason came along, no one had enough skill (and luck with the weather) to climb the line without Maestri’s bolts, and no one had enough courage to remove them.” Some authorities, however, confessed to mixed feelings. Ermanno Salvaterra, who in 2005, with Garibotti and a third partner, finally made the first ascent of Maestri’s alleged 1959 route on the north face of Cerro Torre, said, “What [Kruk and Kennedy] have done is so special, for they have shown the world that that line was actually climbable in a [clean] way, even in 1970.” But he added, “Personally I would have wanted to do something similar [to chopping the bolts], but at first I would have discussed that with Cesare Maestri.”

Salvaterra, who knows Maestri well, adds a beguiling footnote to the controversy. “In 1970,” he says, “Maestri himself wanted to chop all the bolts on his route. He wanted to remove them so that people coming after him would have not been able to climb the route.” But his partners, fearing bad weather, demanded an immediate retreat. Before heading down, Maestri did chop the last twenty bolts below the compressor—a final “up yours” to his critics and rivals.

Jim Donini, former president of the American Alpine Club, was a member in 1975 of the first team to repeat Maestri’s purported route up to the Col of Conquest. What he found there convinced him that Maestri, Egger, and Fava had not even reached the col, let alone climbed the mountain. Says Donini now, “The Compressor Route is an abomination that mars an otherwise nearly perfect mountain. A mountain of such stature should only yield its summit to parties willing to and capable of climbing by fair means.” But, “I have always felt that the Compressor Route should be dealt with by the Argentinians themselves.” In 2007, in fact, a conference of local climbers and guides was held in El Chalten to debate chopping the bolts. Thirty out of the forty present voted to keep the bolts intact. Gregory Crouch comments, “People would go crazy if a group of Italians chopped the bolt ladder at the top of the Nose on El Cap. I don’t see the moral difference between what just happened on Cerro Torre and that hypothetical event.”

* * *At last, on January 26, Kruk and Kennedy emerged from their silence, issuing a statement written by Kruk. Its tone was unrepentant, even defiant. “Maestri’s actions were a complete atrocity,” wrote Kruk. “His use of bolts and heavy machinery was outrageous, even for the time. The Southeast Ridge was attainable by fair means in the 70s, he stole that climb from the future.” Rhetorically, he added, “Who committed the act of violence against Cerro Torre? Maestri, by installing the bolts, or us, by removing them?”

The Kruk-Kennedy statement only unleashed a new spate of online controversy and further polarized the responders. One called the two young men “climbing Ghadhafi i.e. Kennedy and a climbing Saddam Hussein i.e. Kruk.” Others demanded that Kennedy and Kruk be banned from climbing in Patagonia until they put the bolts on the Compressor Route back in themselves.

In a separate interview with National Geographic Online, Kruk elaborated on the decision to chop the bolts: “In El Chalten over many seasons and cocktail hours with many climbers, we had talked about the pros and cons of bolt chopping. But our decision to go through with it was in fact made on the summit, where we discussed it for 30 or 45 minutes. To talk about the bolt removal beforehand or during the climb was in our minds calling our ascent a guarantee. We had no guarantees up there; in fact, I had been shut down just forty meters from the top last year. This time, I held my breath till the top. On top, we said, ‘Gee, we did it . . . . Now what about those bolts?’ ”

What does this controversy portend for the future of mountaineering? Does Kruk and Kennedy’s feat present the next generation with a shining example of purist style in homage to a formidable objective? Or does it plumb the anarchic core of the age-old quest for distant summits, which decrees that nobody can tell anyone else what to do in the mountains? Curiously, Maestri himself, alive and compos mentis at the age of 82 in his home in the village of Madonna di Campiglio, has yet to comment on the new controversy.

Whatever the ultimate fallout in this latest chapter in mountaineering history, it’s clear that the magnitude and fervor of the reaction to their bolt-chopping extravaganza stunned Kruk and Kennedy. Those who know the young men well see them as anything but the arrogant poseurs their detractors have vilified. Says Rolando Garibotti, “I like both of them. They are not selfish, and they are not egomaniacs. Hayden is the most good-natured, modest, and kind person I know.” Jim Donini concurs, “I don’t know Jason, but I know Hayden quite well and find him to be an exceptional young man.” And in spite of his dismay over the bolt chopping, Gregory Crouch, who does not know Kruk and Kennedy personally, concludes, “From everything I hear, they are both really good guys. They’re so damn young and so damn talented. I hope this isn’t what they’re remembered for.”